


Woke up from a Dream

by conniptionns



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-11-13 21:45:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11194071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/conniptionns/pseuds/conniptionns
Summary: Andrew can't sleep because of nightmares, so Neil drives him around playing his music until Andrew falls asleep. Neil keeps driving until the sun comes up





	1. Chapter 1

Neil was lying as still as possible in bed next to Andrew. He clicked the lock button on his phone and muffled an oath when a wash of bright light burned his eyes and lit up Andrew’s face. 2:02. He swiped up on his phone, violently; trying to dim the piece of shit Andrew had gotten him. He didn’t need a new phone, but he had to admit that having apps when you couldn’t sleep was pretty sweet. He clicked the music app and pawed at the floor, looking for his earphones. They were tangled. Fuck. He laid his phone face down on his chest and started to pick the tangled cord apart. Had they not been tangled, he wouldn’t have heart the short huff of air Andrew breathed out. Neil froze. The last thing he wanted to do was wake Andrew up. They had to be up at 5 am in order to get to morning workouts on time, and once Andrew woke up, he didn’t go back to sleep.

Seventeen heartbeats passed in agonizing silence before Neil picked the earphones back up. It was twenty-five more before the bed moved slightly from Andrew’s body locking tightly beside Neil. Neil held his breath and froze. If Andrew was having a nightmare Neil definitely didn’t want to move and pull Andrew further into the horror his mind had him trapped in. The seconds passed in tense and agonizing silence.

It must have been thirty minutes before Neil dared move again. When he went to pick up the earphones, he knocked his phone off the bed with his elbow, and it clattered noisily to the floor.

“Could you be any fucking louder?” Andrew asked in a gruff, sleep saturated voice.

Neil froze. He didn’t dare breathe in the hopes that Andrew wasn’t really awake and would go right back to sleep. No such luck.

“Do you have a reason for waking me up at—“ he tilted his wrist so his watch lit up “—half past two in the morning?”

“I couldn’t sleep. I thought I was being quiet.”

“Well, you weren’t, so let’s go for a drive.” Andrew slid out of bed and reached for the car keys.

Andrew shuffled out of the bedroom and Neil followed him neither of them bothering with changing out of their sleep pants or putting on shoes. They got into the elevator before Andrew pulled out a cigarette and held it limply between his lips while he dug in his pocket for a lighter. Of course, he didn’t sleep with a lighter, so he stuck the cigarette behind his ear and as they reached the main level, he let out a jaw cracking yawn and Neil reached for the keys.

“And what do you think you’re doing?” Andrew asked through another yawn.

“You’re too tired to drive, I’m too awake to be a passenger, so we’re switching roles tonight. Maybe you won’t have any nightmares if in the car.”

“What do you know about my nightmares?” Andrew asked, slightly annoyed but not put out enough to take back the keys.

“Perilously little,” Neil said pressing the fob to unlock the doors. The lights flashed twice, making Andrew’s hair shine gold in the darkness and Neil’s face to be thrown into the shadow. “Though, I’ll tell you this, whenever I had nightmares while I was on the run—and that was pretty often—I always slept better in the car. At first I thought it might be the rhythmic sound of the car speeding over asphalt, or maybe even that whenever my mother drove at night she would play the radio quietly to keep her company while I slept.”

Neil slid into the car and Andrew followed on the passenger side. Andrew dug for a lighter in the glove box and lit his cigarette while Neil continued.

“I think it was the fact that we were constantly moving. It’s hard for your demons to chase you when you’re constantly speeding through backroads. Weaving through windy paths through cities that slept so soundly it was like the world has ceased to exist. It was in those moments that I think I slept just as deeply as those people in their homes. My mother would have the moon roof open and the wind would swoop down into the car, whip around my sleeping body and then escape into the night. Those nights that we ran instead of stopping, nothing could touch me. And Andrew? Nothing’s going to touch you.”

Neil braked gently at a stoplight and turned to look at Andrew for the first time since they got in the car. He was already asleep, lit cigarette still drooping between his lips. Neil snorted softly to himself and plucked it from Andrew’s lips before flicking it out the window into the dark night as he accelerated onto the interstate. He didn’t have a destination in mind, he was thinking north.

He gave Andrew one more glance before he turned on some soft music, pressing harder on the gas. He thumbed out a message without glancing down at his phone.

_We’re going to miss morning practice. We’ll make up for it later._

He headed north and continued driving until the sun rose, making sure not to do anything to wake Andrew.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final, THE pièce de résistance

In Andrew's experience, dreams could be categorized into two types: there were nightmares, and then there were mother-fucking- _nightmares_. For most of his life, Andrew had had the latter, but since he met Neil 'Living Nightmare' Josten, his brain had decided that with the level of acute stress he dealt with during the day, he only really needed the former. It was a practice in self-torture, or more like, Andrew's brain tortured Andrew.

The only good part of having mother-fucking- _nightmares_ was that when you experienced the normal kind, your heart rate stayed fairly normal. Andrew could typically share a bed with Neil without Neil ever knowing that Andrew was having a horrible dream. But this one was different, Andrew was frozen and there was nothing he could do to wake himself up. Andrew always knew when he was asleep. He slept so lightly that there probably wasn't a time that he was too deep in sleep to be aware of himself, so he could usually shake himself out of a nightmare. Tonight he couldn't. He didn't know if it was the subject of the dream or the fact that he had taken something for a headache right before bed, but Andrew was locked in his dream, unable to escape.

They say that you can find your way out of a dream by finding the one part that doesn't make sense, then your body will obey what your mind already knows and allow you to move. Andrew couldn't find whatever his mind had created as a secret escape route. But then his savior came.

Rather, Neil started making a fucking racket and his brain kicked his body into overdrive unlocking whatever had paralyzed him. Andrew gave him hell, but he was more grateful to Neil than he ever could have imagined being.

They went on a drive and before Andrew realized it, he was asleep. This time there was a third type of dream. Something about the movement of the car, the sound of the air conditioning, the sound of Neil singing under his breath, or maybe it was the flash of the streetlights washing over his face in brief flashes in between the spill of darkness.

There wasn't a picture to go along with the dream, just a feeling of contentment and the occasional flash of light that turned his eyelids slightly pink around the edges. There was no smoothing over what had been done to him. Andrew wasn't malleable, but granite with fault lines running throughout him and when he went to chisel away at himself to make something beautiful, he had to work around those imperfections and find a way to make them beautiful. Andrew didn't have an eye for beauty; he supposed he would know it when he saw it.

Being there in the car with Neil was as close to perfection as Andrew thought he could ever get. Maybe it was something in the way he could feel Neil smoothly sliding between cars on the interstate—long-haul truckers and families heading out on vacation. He was glad that he had the ability to recall memories perfectly because he knew he could never recreate this moment. There were too many variables that were just as changeable as Andrew himself, but he could see the picture and remember it when he went to chisel himself into something he could see as beautiful.

And maybe, just maybe, he could find a consistency in the quiet beauty of being with Neil. Neil was still singing and it was lulling Andrew further into a dreamless sleep.

 _Sugar pie honey bunch, you know I love you. I can't help myself. I love you and nobody else. In and out my life you come and you go leaving just your picture behind and I kissed it a thousand times. When you snap your finger or wink your eye I come a-running to you. I'm tied to your apron strings and there's nothing that I can do—I can't help myself...._.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr @exybooks!

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @exychamp


End file.
